I should consider it the proudest accomplishment of my life, as well as of signal benefit to mankind, to bring forward an exposition of Nature luminous to all. But I think the attempt would be in nowise beneficial except to a few who require merely slight guidance to enable them to find it out for themselves; to most persons it would do no good but would only fill them with the empty conceit of knowledge and with contempt for others, as if they had learnt something solemn.
It may therefore be safely assumed that Plato intentionally refused to publish his views upon the most important subjects in a world of spite and puzzling contention. Note what he says in the Seventh Letter of the true disciple who is
in fact a lover of Wisdom, related to it and worthy of it by reason of his own inherent divinity. He thinks that he has been told of a wonderful Path, on which he ought forthwith to travel and that any other manner of life is unendurable. After this he does not torture both himself and his Leader by departing from the Path before he reaches the Goal, thereby obtaining the power of journeying without a Guide to point out the way before him. But they, who are not really lovers of Wisdom, but have only a coating of color like those whose bodies are sunburnt, when they perceive how many things are to be learnt and find out how great is the labor and what temperance in daily nourishment is requisite, they deem it too difficult and beyond their powers and become unable to attend to it at all and some of them persuade themselves that they have sufficiently heard the whole and do not wish further to exert themselves.
At Plato's death in 347 b. c. the house, the library, and the garden in the Academy, were bequeathed by the Master as the permanent property of the School, whose income in the course of the centuries was largely increased by endowments. For about three hundred years the grounds at the Academy remained uninterruptedly the Headquarters of the School, but during the Siege of Athens by the Roman general Sulla in 87 b. c., the Teacher or Scholarch of that time was forced to retire within the city walls and gave his instruction in the Gymnasium, called Ptolemaeum, where Cicero heard the Scholarch Antiochos in 79 b. c. For more than six hundred years longer the grounds at the Academy remained in possession of the School, which however soon degenerated into a form of philosophical scepticism and eclecticism, from which it was later recalled by the so-called Neo- or New Platonists. Finally under the pressure of ecclesiastical bigotry and greed the Emperor Justinian confiscated the School property and forbade the last Scholarch Damascius to teach. Accordingly a little band of seven Platonic Pilgrim-sages, consisting of Damascius, Simplicius, Eulalius, Priscian, Hermeias, Diogenes, and Isidore, to avoid ecclesiastical persecution, were forced to wander away from the domains of Christendom over mountain and desert to the distant court of the Persian Emperor Chosroës, who four years later forced Justinian by treaty to let the last of the Neoplatonists return to their native land and die a natural death, guaranteeing them protection against further monkish persecution. It is a strange fact that as soon as the School grounds in the Academy were confiscated, a rumor, true or false, presently spread to the effect that the deserted property had become straightway unhealthy, a rumor which has persisted to this day, although it is impossible for one who has visited the spot to perceive any reason why it should not under proper cultivation re-become the healthful and beautiful garden it once was.
The following notice appeared in the Bibliotheca Platonica for November-December, 1889:
Secure the Academy! We desire to call the attention of Platonists throughout the world to the fact that the site of the Ancient Academy at Athens, Greece, could probably be secured by prompt and concerted action. Proper measures should be taken at once to organize an association having for its object the purchase, preservation and restoration of the place where Plato lived and taught and where his disciples continued his sublime and enlightening work for centuries. It should be rescued from the hands of the profane, and set aside for the perpetual use and benefit of all true followers of Divine Philosophy. There is no good reason, why, in due time, the Platonic School should not again become, as it once was, the nursery of Science and Wisdom for the whole World.
Note the significant words of Thomas Taylor, the great Platonist of a hundred years ago, who in the words of H. P. Blavatsky is "one of the very few commentators on old Greek and Latin authors who have given their just dues to the ancients for their mental development":
As to the philosophy (Platonism, as taught by Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato) by whose assistance these (the Eleusinian and Orphic) Mysteries are developed, it is coeval with the universe itself; and however its continuity may be broken by opposing systems, it will make its appearance at different periods of time, as long as the sun himself shall continue to illuminate the world. It has been, indeed, and may hereafter be violently assaulted by delusive opinions; but the opposition will be just as imbecile as that of the waves of the sea against a temple, built on a rock, which majestically pours them back,
"Broken and vanquish'd foaming to the main."
Somewhat similar although less suggestive is the tribute of a recent writer upon Neoplatonism:
The Neoplatonist held that nothing perishes and Neoplatonism is still alive. Its mysticism has lived on. Its idealism can never die.